McGill Reporter news

On Jan. 13, McGill’s Faculty of Law welcomes Jocelyn Downie, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy and Professor in the Faculties of Law and Medicine at Dalhousie University, to deliver the annual Lecture in Health and Law: Just Dying: A Discussion of Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide and the Law.

Observant readers will have noticed that the address on the Reporter masthead has changed. As of Fri., Jan. 14, the Media Relations Office will be operating out of James Administration Building as part of an effort to consolidate the diverse and scattered McGill's Public Affairs units under (almost) one roof.

Full disclosure: When it comes to technology, I’m what you might call a throwback. OK, a Luddite. Whatever. And when it comes to reading a well-written story, the feel of smooth, durable, acid-free, perfectly toned creamy white pages that balance just the right dose of ink into painstakingly designed fonts are soothing. I even like the smell of old, yellowing books.

When the organizing committee launched the University’s 2010 Centraide campaign back on Sept. 28, it set two goals – to raise $325,000, and to increase the number of participating employee donors. The campaign was a success on both fronts. It officially came to a close on Dec.

Friends and former colleagues from McGill recalled Tony Proudfoot’s passion for both teaching and learning after the former Alouette passed away at age 61 on Dec. 30 following a courageous three-year battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

In just a few minutes the choir members will take their place in front of the audience and begin their four-song set. Some look a little nervous, holding their songbook to their chest and silently staring straight ahead. Others seem entirely at ease, chatting happily with friends and family.

Serious musicians go to great lengths to protect and maintain their instruments. But because it’s a part of their bodies, one they use for hours every day even when they’re not making music, singers sometimes neglect their only instrument – the voice and the vocal cords that produce it.

According to the 2006 census, explains recent McGill Law graduate Keith Serry, the average Montreal artist makes about $29,600 per year. According to the Canadian Bar Association, he adds, the average hourly rate for a lawyer in Canada is $254. “It doesn’t take long to put those two numbers together and realize there’s a gap.”

It’s the Year of Jazz at the Schulich School of Music – a year-long celebration of the improvisational musical genre that developed in North America a century ago. Fittingly enough, the school’s recently installed Interim Dean, Gordon Foote is the first person from the School’s Jazz program to lead the school.

PhD candidate Sally P. Ragep's research centers on a scholar named Mahmud ibn Muhammad ibn `Umar al-Jaghmini, wrote one of the most important works of Islamic science, a ubiquitous elementary astronomical text called the Epitome of Astronomy. She went all the way to Turkmenistan to attend a conference and present a paper on him.

Sandy Pearlman, the legendary rock-music producer credited with coining the term “heavy metal,” has been a visiting professor at the Schulich School of Music for the past five years. In an hour-long interview with the Reporter, Pearlman shared his views on how digitization and the Internet have turned music into essentially a free commodity. The following are excerpts from that conversation:

Megan Fitzgerald doesn’t put much stock in stereotypes, especially the one that says you can’t be athletic and “artsy” at the same time. Not that there’s any artsy pretension from Fitzgerald, who grew up on her family’s beef cattle farm in the tiny Ontario community of Maple Leaf.

As a music therapist for the past 26 years, Deborah Salmon understands better than most the important role music can play in people’s lives. But as the music therapist for the Montreal General Hospital’s palliative care service, she also understands the vital role music can play as people prepareto die.